Alongside Garriott is a strong team of veteran game developers with experience in creating games in multiple genres (Tracy Hickman, the author behind Dragonlance and Deathgate, has also joined up). The team members have an average of 10+ years of development experience each and all together have pushed out over 50 games into the market (Wing Commander, Guild Wars, Privateer, and Dragon Age just to name a few). That is quite an A-Team that Garriott has going there, but the situation gets even better when you take a look at what Shroud of the Avatar is all about.

“Yes, you will be able to play with your friends! Multiplayer games encourage social bonds that go far beyond what can be accomplished in a solo player game. I remember the depth of these bonds in players who met in-game only to get married in real life, how people who died in the real world were deeply mourned and celebrated by their online friends whom they may never have met face to face. Though Shroud of the Avatar won’t be a massively multiplayer online role playing game, it will be a multiplayer game. We will be describing this in more detail in our upcoming community blogs…

The game can be played offline, no connection required. The character used for the offline version of the game will not be useable in the online version of the game for obvious exploit/hacking reasons. We are going to investigate ways to export your online character to the single player version of the game but the offline character will not be importable into the online version.”

As promised, we’re ready to reveal more design details. Based on feedback from the forums we’re revealing some details on housing!

Let me jump right into the stuff you guys really want to hear:

House maintenance and acquisition can be paid for with in game currency (KS houses have no upkeep cost ever) *House deeds can be traded between players Houses are 100% secure for items stored in them though not always 100% accessible due to nasty sieges by evil forces Houses exist in shared spaces (not instanced) and everyone will see your house and its decorations Houses can be decorated both inside and out Houses will be fairly limited but more will be added over time as we grow the world City houses > Town houses > Village houses Vendors for houses will be paid a percentage of the item that they sell (KS vendors will not take a cut of the profits) Ok, hopefully that answered 80% of the housing questions we've received! For the other 20%, here are details, in written and video form:

We've got some great news for everyone who has requested a way to use PayPal to help support our Shroud of the Avatar Project! You now have the ability to do so by visiting https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/

We also have a short video where Richard "Lord British" takes one of our programmers through the same process he was inspired by to eventually evaluate player virtues in his Ultima games, using a set of questions.